Coach Eric Swedberg disappeared in the center of the Auburn High School varsity baseball team at Monday's practice.

The 25 boys and two coaches, standing and silent, gathered in a circle around him, as he talked about their Central Massachusetts Division 2 win Saturday and the game against Western Massachusetts champions Greenfield rescheduled for this afternoon.

“I can't stress enough how proud I am of you not getting rattled,” he said in a voice that wasn't raised but commanded the room. “We can ride that discipline into tomorrow.”

After deciding with the players whether to keep the rotation or change it, the players broke seamlessly into four groups in the gym and worked on skills, often helping each other out.

Any teacher would be proud to have a classroom that functioned so well. Clark University professor Eric DeMeulenaere and Vassar College professor Colette N. Cann, both of whom were coaches and teachers before becoming professors, believe coaching was so good for their teaching that they've written a book about it. James E. McDermott, a part-time faculty member at Clark who is a former English teacher and coach in the Worcester public schools, and Chad R. Malone, a Clark graduate, former Worcester public school teacher and coach and current teacher at Premier Elite Athlete's Collegiate in Ontario, also contributed sections.

The book, “Reflections from the Field: How Coaching Made Us Better Teachers,” came out this spring. It is aimed at teachers but is divided into narratives and commentary. The narratives, in particular, are interesting reading for anyone. “The stories are interesting, and they're full of humanity. Some of them are even funny,” Mr. McDermott humbly opined in an interview.

The stories are entertaining but also show how lessons from the playing fields helped the teachers take on classroom challenges. Mr. McDermott showed his players that while some rules are too stupid to follow — like one that required a baseball team to station a player outside the fence to retrieve balls during every game — there are ways to disobey rules without drawing discipline. He also stood up to a prejudiced ump in a way that changed the ump and restored some dignity to his players. Coaching taught him the power of earning students' trust, and that, in turn, brought dividends in the classroom, according to the book.

For Mr. Malone, it took some time to realize that the honesty and clarity he used with his team on the basketball court were also the best ways to reach students in the classroom. If a team suffers a 90-6 loss, people should be outraged, not offering condolences. The same is true in the classroom, he said.

“I find that so many educators are willing to accept losses for the kids they teach,” he writes.

Ms. Cann, a former volleyball coach, said she learned as a coach that the best teams were those in which each player was integral to the team as a whole. But at the start, she said, they also had to develop a certain toughness.

That was true in the classroom, too, she found, where some students were “missing the requisite aggressiveness necessary to win at the academic game.”

Mr. DeMeulenaere wrote his dissertation on students who transformed their academic identity and found that “sports played an integral role in that transformation of who they were as students.” His section notes that building individual students' ability to lead helps the class as a whole.

The book might help some teachers transfer excellent coaching to excellent teaching, he said. “A lot of coaches that are doing amazing stuff ... their teaching is horrible,” he said. Sometimes they “don't ever make the translation. ... I had to learn about these lessons myself, and it took a while for me.”

Ms. Cann said the book, which grew out of a panel discussion, was a gift in that it gave her a chance to reflect on what she had drawn from being a coach.

At Auburn High, Mr. Swedberg had finished a day of teaching Spanish before baseball practice started.

During the last class of the day, he kept up an almost constant banter in English and Spanish. Trying to get their juices flowing, he offered extra credit for anyone who could finish a worksheet first, and encouraged the somewhat listless freshmen and sophomores to collaborate. Then he led them in a form of bingo and around the world to drill vocabulary words. “This is it! Sudden death! ... You nervous a little bit?” he joked.

Contact Jacqueline Reis via email at jreis@telegram.com and follow her on Twitter @JackieReisTG.